Caught my eye this morning - thought this was well worthy of a re-read.
With all the criticism of Brazil only just getting stadiums finished - I thought it worthy of re-highlighting just how badly run our club has been off the field.
And yes - this was Rick Parry speaking ELEVEN years ago.
Rick Parry - New Stadium latest
16th April 2003
When is the planning application going in for the new stadium? When might building start? When will it finish? Rick Parry has all the answers in part three of our exclusive interview
Liverpoolfc.tv: When will planning application go in for the new Stadium? When might building work start and when will it be completed?
Rick Parry: The planning application will be going in towards the middle of the year. There's a tremendous amount of work going on at the moment with our professional team, who are pulling all the detailed plans together. It's getting very exciting now the way things are taking shape.
Interestingly, a lot of the work now is centring on the surrounds of the stadium such as the re-use of the existing site, the re-use of the parkland, all of which will be taken into account by the city when they consider the planning application. They won't just be looking at the stadium itself.
We hope the planning application will be turned around relatively quickly, within just over three months, so it's perfectly feasible to say the building of the ground could start before the end of this calendar year.
Our big hope is that the planning application doesn't get called in by the government because that could add a year to the process and be a significant delay.
You're looking at somewhere around two years to build the stadium so, realistically, it'll be sometime in the second half of 2005 or early 2006 by the time it's finished.
What other obstacles are there to overcome before the new Stadium is given the go-ahead?
There's a lot still to be done. We have to make sure we have the money to build it which is one of the major challenges, and more importantly making sure we can afford the repayments because we've always said we don't want to land ourselves with a white elephant. The only reason we're doing this is to generate more revenue so we can then plough more money back into the team. Financial advisors are on board now and are making sure that the plans are sound.
There's still a lot to do but ever since we got the positive vote from the local community that a clear majority of residents are in favour, everything has felt a lot more positive. The council has been very supportive and the mood locally, by and large, has been 'lets get on with it'. It's very exciting.
Is there any chance we might still stay at Anfield?
Because the new stadium is complex and because there's still a lot to do, it would be silly to say there is absolutely zero chance. The problem has always been that if we stay here we won't be progressing because the chances of a significant expansion on this site are extremely slim.
We took the decision that moving forward with a capacity of 46,000 is not enough. We're also conscious that in the relatively near future the Main Stand would have to be rebuilt because it's old. Given the safety standards we have to abide by, the irony is if we rebuilt the Main Stand we'd end up with a lower capacity than we have at the moment, so that'd mean we'd be going backwards.
Doing nothing is not an option and in our evaluation the new stadium is going to be a more efficient way forward. Emotionally, of course, we wanted to stay at Anfield but the next best thing is we're staying in Anfield and we're certainly paying a lot of attention to making sure we've got a link between the old and the new. We're not going to be very far away. We're more than conscious of the significance of the Hillsborough Memorial, the ashes scattered on the pitch here, the Shankly Gates etc and the exciting task is making sure all of those are blended into the new stadium so we have a transition from old to new.
How far have we got in those 11 years?
« Last Edit: Jun 16, 2014 11:59:59 am by JD »
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